McCourt Tells Students the Storytelling Power of a Life

A stretch limousine stopped in front of a Manhattan apartment building this morning to pick up a retired schoolteacher named Frank McCourt. It was a means of travel not to his taste, but such are the burdens of luxury for someone who has just won the Pulitzer Prize for biography.

Since the announcement of the award on Monday afternoon, Mr. McCourt has been toasted at a Champagne breakfast, received dozens of congratulatory letters and telegrams and appeared on both the ''Today'' program and ''Late Night With Conan O'Brien.'' But the spare-no-expense celebrations have not kept him from maintaining his posture of wise detachment. After all, his award-winning memoir, ''Angela's Ashes'' (Scribner, 1996), centers on an Irish childhood of relentless poverty: of flea-infested mattresses and dying infant siblings, of a father who drank and a mother who endured.

Nor did all the hoopla prevent Mr. McCourt from keeping a longstanding commitment to go to Bay Shore High School and talk to students about the art of writing from experience. He climbed into the limousine -- who paid for it, he did not know -- and headed east toward Long Island.

A few hours later, and less than two days after having won the Pulitzer Prize, a man stepped up to a lectern in the high school's auditorium and presented himself as a 66-year-old, first-time author. His message to the hundreds of students: to understand, as he did, the storytelling power of your own life.

That learning process took decades. For many years, Mr. McCourt associated with some of the celebrated writers and journalists of New York City, swapping tales at the Old Town Bar, singing Irish ballads at the Lion's Head. But he would often return home feeling as though he too should be writing; that he too should be learning from the English lessons he preached to his students at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan.

He never doubted that he had a story to tell. When he was 4 years old, his Irish-born parents moved from Depression-ridden Brooklyn back to Ireland, where the family's conditions only worsened. In little more than a year, a pair of toddler twins and a weeks-old baby girl died. His father, Malachy, spun within the alcoholic's spiral: get a job, drink the wages, miss a day's work, get fired. His mother, Angela, held the family together by groveling for its food and clothing. Life for young Frank was a blur of begging, catching a schoolmaster's switch and shivering in the Limerick wetness.

In an interview before his speech, Mr. McCourt recalled that he had tried to write the book of his childhood almost 30 years ago, but wound up setting the 125-page manuscript aside. ''I was going through my James Joyce period, studied and affected,'' he said. ''I was still struggling to find my voice.''

The years swept by. His mother died in 1981, his estranged father in 1985. He retired from schoolteaching in 1987, did some freelance writing, performed with his brother Malachy in a show called ''A Couple of Blaguards.'' Frank McCourt knew that the point of permanent regret was approaching.

''All along, I wanted to do this book badly,'' he said. ''I would have to do it or I would have died howling.''

In November 1995, after a year of feverish writing, Mr. McCourt finished his manuscript about Angela and her lot. Completion brought him peace. ''It's between the covers of the book now,'' he said. ''It's captured.''

The book has also brought him acclaim. In addition to the Pulitzer, which, he says, ''I really didn't believe I was going to get, '' ''Angela's Ashes'' won an award from the National Book Critics Circle, and has risen to No. 1 on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. It has also elevated him to a position in which he is called upon to expound an any Irish matter, ''from agriculture to the decline in the consumption of claret in the west of Ireland.''

He has accepted this mantle with good grace. But he said he has noticed a touch of stereotyping in the reviews of his book. Critics, he said, tend to describe his book -- and the books of other Irish authors, for that matter -- as ''charming and lyrical.'' In fact, he said, he wanted his description of poverty to be lice-ridden and real.

''I didn't want it to be 'charming and lyrical,' '' he said. ''I wanted to get away from that Irish stuff. And I did.''

When Mr. McCourt got out of the limousine, the teachers at Bay Shore High greeted him with a breakfast in the school superintendent's boardroom. Next to the muffins was a pile of copies of ''Angela's Ashes,'' all waiting to be signed by the author. Against one wall hung a large sign: ''Tis a Pulitzer.''

Nina Wolff, the coordinator of the writing conference, which was called ''The Ethnic Pen,'' admitted to worrying that the post-Pulitzer crush might force Mr. McCourt to cancel his visit. Although other accomplished authors were attending, he was scheduled to give the keynote address to students from 30 Long Island high schools.

''But he's first and foremost a teacher,'' she said. ''He wouldn't do that to students.''

The teachers and the special guest finished their coffee and headed to the auditorium. Appearing first on the stage was Keystone, a group of young musicians who sang about love and life on the challenging streets of the East New York section of Brooklyn. The band's lyrics, one speaker noted, were a form of urban literature. The band's heavy bass notes shook the old wooden walls and energized some students to clap and dance.

Then Mr. McCourt, slight and white-haired, took the stage. After 27 years as a teacher, he knew how to keep the attention of a student audience. But the power of his story alone would have done the job: of his drunken father waking him and his brothers in the middle of the night to make them vow to ''die for Ireland''; of being so poor that he aspired to become an inmate in America. ''My dream was purely economic,'' he said. ''In prison everybody was warm and got three meals a day.''

His message to the students, in a depressed community, was to work past their anger, recognize their self-worth and see the significance of their lives. When he finished, the teen-agers stomped their feet.

Afterward, Mr. McCourt sat in the school library to answer questions. ''Do you think it was worth it now?'' one student asked. ''Your childhood?''

Mr. McCourt smiled a gentle and sad smile.

''Now, yes,'' he said. ''But I wouldn't want to have to do it again.''